Pushing the boundaries of creative code

Supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Open(Art) initiative is all about supporting projects that facilitate artistic expression and learning on the open web, using code to enable cutting-edge art, media and hardware production.

Over the next six months, the fellows will create open source tools and works that enable creative production and open participation. They’ll document their progress online, seek to grow communities of artists, developers and users around their projects, and publish their resulting code under an open license.

And the fellows are…

Meemoo brings the power of app development to everyone. It’s an HTML5 data flow programming environment with an emphasis on realtime audio-visual manipulation. Using an intuitive visual interface that lets users connect modules together using colorful “wires,” Meemoo lets anyone remix and build their own creative apps right in the browser.

“I often see kids playing with touch screen apps that only do what the developer designs it to do,” Forrest says. “I want to blur that line between developer and user, and allow more people to create different kinds of media.”

Pixel Shaders is an interactive book, platform and community focused on harnessing the graphics processor (GPU) for artistic purposes. It aims to make GPU programming accessible to artists in the same way that tools like Processing made CPU programming more accessible to digital creators.

Toby wants to get people thinking about programming in a new way. “This is one of the key areas where the artistic community can contribute to the computer science communities,” he says.

Bomfu is a collaborative web repository for open hardware projects. It aims to increase the ease of use and quality for the “bill of materials” or “BOM,” a list of the raw materials required to build a finished product. The goal: open up new and more complex forms of open hardware creation.

“Making all of the tools better pushes up what can be built,” says Addie and Stefan. “The better the tools are, the more complex the projects.”

These three projects will be awarded a production budget and resources to develop their work. Eyebeam will also host workshops and public events at its New York City location to support their process, and Mozilla is inviting our global community to get involved.